//------------------------------// // 2: Learning Curve // Story: Pony Souls // by TcogArchitect //------------------------------// Twilight turned around, checking her new apparel in the mirror. She had decided immediately that she would be using her magic as much as possible, and Rarity had picked out clothes to support that. She now wore a dark blue robe, which Rarity had found on a permanently dead body during one of her scavenging runs, a pair of ankle-high boots on her hind legs, and thickly-wound cloth bracers on her front legs. Her head, however, was covered with a standard helmet, with a hole for her horn. "We may be Undead," Rarity had reasoned, "but a blow to the head still hurts quite a bit." Twilight had no problem trusting that statement, so even though it was somewhat uncomfortable, she wore it anyway. Satisfied that she was ready, she stepped out and returned to where Rarity was working on the chain mail. "So, anything else I should know before heading out?" Rarity tapped her chin in thought for a second. "Hmm... Oh yes! Make sure that whenever you find a bonfire, you light it. They heal us, and act as a conduit for us to consume souls. Offer souls to a bonfire, and it can turn them into pure power boosts. Your strength, your mind, et cetera. It's difficult to describe, but you'll know how it works when you do it yourself. Oh, and one more thing." She trotted back downstairs, and Twilight followed her. In one of the back rooms, there was a large chest, which Rarity opened. After fishing around in it for a few moments, she pulled out a dull green flask and shut the chest again. "Here. This is called an Estus Flask. If you hold it over a bonfire, it will fill with Estus, which you can then use to heal yourself later." Twilight took the rather large container with her hooves, and studied it a little more closely. There were decorative etchings covering it, but the material was unlike anything she had seen before. "Rarity," she said after a minute, looking up at her friend, "what is this made of? I've never come across anything like this before." The other unicorn shrugged. "I have no idea, honestly. No one even seems to know where they came from. No one is sure how the bonfires came to be, either. All anyone seems to know is, they're comforting." Twilight returned to studying the flask, but after a few more minutes, gave up trying to recognize any of the patterns. "Well, I'll have to figure it out later. I need to go find the others, and then find a way to fix all this." She started back towards the door, before Rarity called her back. "Wait a moment! Don't you want to take a weapon?" Twilight looked back at her friend's worried face, then shook her head. "Nah. I still have my magic, so I shouldn't have any trouble. I'll see you later, Rarity!" She galloped out the door, shutting it behind her, as Rarity's protest went unheard. "But... you don't even have any scrolls...." Twilight trotted through Ponyville, still slightly unnerved by the complete silence, but no longer terrified now that she knew more or less what was going on. She headed towards Sugarcube Corner first, since it would be easiest to get to, and quickly found herself in front of the store. Unfortunately, however, it was boarded up, apparently in an attempt to keep out Hollows. She approached the doors anyway, and knocked loudly. "Hello?" she called up to the second story, where Pinkie lived, "Pinkie? Are you in there?" She was met with silence, so she started moving around the building, looking for the back door. "It should be right... Ah-ha!" She pulled the handle with her hoof. Finding the door to be unlocked, she went in. She immediately wished she hadn't. The first thing she saw was a large ballista set up at the far wall. The second thing she saw was the rope connecting the door handle to the trigger mechanism. The last thing she saw was the bolt the ballista fired just before it went through her jaw. Then the world faded away, and she felt her body seem to blow away in the breeze as her senses failed entirely and she died. ------------------------------ "GHYYAAAAAAH!" Twilight woke up gasping, and panted hard as she tried to recall how she got on the floor. Looking around, she noticed she was back in the library, sitting next to the weird fire from before. "Wait... weird fire.... That's right! This must be one of those bonfires Rarity was talking about! But if I'm sitting here, then that means..." She trailed off as she remembered the ballista, and frowned at having been so quickly dispatched right after getting her bearings. She huffed, got up, and stormed back outside, heading straight for the bakery's back door in the most indignant fashion she could muster. She was, after all, Twilight Sparkle! She should be harder to kill than that! All those years of being Princess Celestia's personal stu- She froze, all other concerns forgotten, as that one thought overtook her mind. Where is Princess Celestia? It suddenly occurred to her that not only had she not seen her mentor, but she hadn't seen Princess Luna, Princess Cadence, Shining Armor, or even a single Royal Guard since she first awoke. She looked up over the houses at Canterlot, and although the city seemed to still be mostly intact, she could tell that there were pieces of buildings missing, and the waterfalls that always decorated the parts of Canterlot that hung off the mountain had stopped. Twilight shuddered, trying not to think of what could have happened to cause such a drastic change in what seemed like such a short amount of time. In truth, she didn't know how much time had passed, nor how many deaths she had already sustained but didn't remember. That thought alone brought back her panic, but she quickly forced herself to take deep breaths, and soon she was calm again. She hurried back to Sugarcube Corner, not wanting to think about her situation any further until she had collected her friends and knew what to do next. She approached the back door more carefully this time, but found that it was still open, and the ballista had not been redrawn. "Well, that's helpful," she said to herself. She carefully walked in, poking her head past every corner to check for more traps before continuing. Finally, she made it to the stairs. "Okay, I should be fine, now. After all, who would put a trap on their own staircase? They'd never be able to leave." She put a hoof on the first step. click "Oh-" was all she managed before a secret panel in one of the stairs, level with her head, flipped open to reveal a crossbow. It fired, and the bolt went straight into Twilight's eye and into her brain, killing her instantly. ------------------------------ Twilight once more came to next to the bonfire, and after once more recalling her fate, jumped to her hooves. "HORSEAPPLES!" she screamed, panting a little in frustration. She galloped out the door, tearing down the street with reckless abandon toward the booby-trapped bakery. She sprinted in the back door, deciding that it was sufficiently probable that if she just ran fast enough, she could get past all the traps before they even activated fully. She took the stairs four at a time, using her long legs to get over the trap trigger at the bottom and not waiting to find out if there were any others further up. At the top of the stairs, she crashed through the first door she saw and dropped down, sliding along her belly to prevent getting shot in the face with a bolt again. Instead, she was stopped mid-slide by a rope, which was obviously meant to be pulled by someone walking into it. Creak... She looked up to the left, and saw a large axe falling towards her. "NOOOOO!" Thunk ------------------------------ Yet again, Twilight found herself waking up next to the bonfire in the library. She growled in frustration, and was about to go rushing back when she stopped. "Wait a second. If this keeps up, I'm not going to make out of the town. First, how much have I forgotten?" She closed her eyes and focused as she started recalling her life as far back as possible, working her way toward the present. It didn't take long for her to find missing information. "My mother.... What was my mother's name? Oh, no. No, nonononono. I need to focus. Let's see... I know I inherited her first name, so 'Twilight' something. It was something soft. Felt? No, that's not it. Come on, come on! It was... Ve... Vel? Yes! Um, um. Vel, vel.... Vel... vet! Velvet! My mother's name is Twilight Velvet! Okay, I need to figure out how to keep that information. Um... Oh! Of course!" She ran downstairs, into her lab. She went straight for the left-most filing cabinet, and opened the bottom drawer. Inside, there were several reams of loose paper, a couple of books, and a few scrolls. She pulled out one of the books, closed the drawer, then opened the next one up. Inside that one were a number of inkpots, and some quills. "I knew having emergency study materials would be a good idea! Thank you, Pinkie Pie!" She grabbed an inkpot and a pair of quills, took her items back upstairs, and set everything down on the main table. "Alright," she said as she opened up the inkpot and held the quill in her magic, "let's do this." The next two and a half hours were spent filling the book with every single piece of information she could remember about herself, her friends, her family, and every major event in her entire life, up until she had woken up to find the world changed. It occurred to her early on that she might forget faces or attributes, so she drew the symbol of the cutie mark of each pony above their name, including her own. Finally, she put the last period on the page, and closed the book. "There. That's everything I remember, up to Trixie using the Alicorn Amulet. I just hope I didn't already forget something else and just haven't realized it yet. Now, I need a safe place to put this. Hmmm..." She looked around, deciding quickly that the best place to hide the book would be one of the shelves filled with other books, when she noticed a small empty space on one of the higher ledges. "Ah! Perfect!" She retrieved the ladder from the other side of the room, and very carefully made her way up to the empty space, holding her new journal close with her magic. She reached the desired shelf, and peered in, finding the hidden button that Spike had discovered during the mirror pool incident. She pressed it with a hoof, and the panel flipped down to reveal a secret compartment. She placed the book inside, closed the panel, and reorganized the books to cover the hole. "Now it should be safe. I doubt anyone would think to look that hard for something that can't even be used as a weapon." Normally, the idea that no one was interested in books anymore would send her into a state of shock, but this time, it was too much of a boon for her to get riled up about it. "Okay, now that that's done, I need to get into Sugarcube Corner. Preferably without getting killed another five times." Calm but still cautious, she returned to the bakery. She made it up the stairs in one piece, and stuck her head around the corner to check for other traps. Looking closely at the floor, she noticed several strings along the length of the hall, and in the walls above them, small holes that would have been completely unnoticed by anyone walking in normally. Twilight grinned to herself satisfactorily. "Not this time." She carefully stepped over each string, working her way down to the pink door at the end. The paint making up the pictures was faded, but the balloons and smiling faces were still discernible, making it obvious that this was Pinkie's room. Twilight reached for the door handle, then stopped, remembering the ballista downstairs. She repositioned herself next to the doorframe, turned the handle to undo the latch, and then kicked it open with one of her back hooves. Shwing-Thunk Unsurprisingly, a large axe swung down from the ceiling inside, carving through the air in front of the door before embedding itself in the opposite wall. Twilight shook her hoof at it with a victorious grin. "Yeah! You won't get me again!" Happy that she finally managed to get rid of one of the many traps in the house, she went into Pinkie's room. Her smile vanished instantly as she came muzzle-to-point with an arrow, knocked against a bow that was drawn and ready to fire. Holding the bow, balancing on her hind legs, was Pinkie, wearing what appeared to be leather armor, and glaring at Twilight from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. "You have ten seconds to convince me not to release."